


Michael's Girl

by Cantatrice18



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Gen, Introspection, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 17:17:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cantatrice18/pseuds/Cantatrice18
Summary: The moment he activated her, Michael knew he'd taken on an unprecedented responsibility. But he had no idea how much he'd come to rely on her, or how much she'd mean to him. She was so much more than just another Janet. She was his.





	Michael's Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to 3x08, "Don't Let the Good Life Pass You By".

He’d never expected feelings to feel quite so, well . . .feely. The phrase “Touchy-Feely” made so much more sense now, particularly after his time on Earth. These days he felt the bizarre desire to wrap his arms around people, and not in a strangulation or crushed-to-death sort of way. Empathy was bizarre, one of those human things always mentioned in passing at the very end of Demon Orientation and invariably followed by, “Right, who wants to try out Elephant Trampoline Torture on these spoken-word poets from Brooklyn?” He’d never even understood friendship until his ethics lessons with Chidi, and that was a social structure so basic even llamas managed it. He’d thought it was his involvement with the four humans that had changed him, but upon further reflection he realized he’d been wrong. His first encounter with real, authentic feelings had come when the neighborhood had been a mere twinkle in his humanoid eye.

It all began with responsibility. Demons tended to treat responsibility like a hot potato, if that potato was really a time bomb that could get you tortured for all eternity if you ended up with it at the end of the game. Michael’s introduction to responsibility, and all it entailed, came just after his neighborhood project was approved. It was a Monday, as it always was in the Bad Place, and he’d crept down to the pure white Janet Warehouse where the Good Place architects kept their Janets stored away. He’d chosen the first Janet he’d seen and stolen her as easily as humans stole candy from bulk bins at their grocery stores. He knew she was a vital asset, the missing piece required for his revolutionary new design. And he’d been right, of course. But she was so much more.

He knew, from the moment he activated her, that he would have to deceive her. She was a Good Janet, after all, not one of those smelly, crass Janets the Bad Place kept loitering about for no apparent reason. She was by her very nature lawful and virtuous. He lied and he lied, as easily as breathing. Easier, since breathing was optional for him. Stupid thing, really, forcing all that air in and out of your body. Much easier to absorb energy through the skin, like plants on Earth. In any case, he kept his Janet in the dark for months without a qualm. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

Of course, she found out eventually, once the humans gave the game away. He rebooted all of them, restarted the process over again, but that first time stayed with him. The look of sweet confusion, like a child learning her mother had eloped on the back of a Harley with an ex-roadie named Spitball, only not hilarious. Even then Janet had meant more to him than a lifeless vessel of knowledge. Reboot after reboot, again and again. Without Sean’s permission, he’d had to reboot manually or risk detection. Seeing her beg for her life, scream and wail piteously, had done nothing to stop him from hitting the red button hundreds of times. But the sound of her voice stayed with him. 

The moment she’d told him to kill her. That was when he’d known for sure. Her logic was perfectly sound, after all. Kill the malfunctioning Janet, steal a new one, and boom: problem solved. But of course, he couldn’t do that. Not when even rebooting her made him cringe. He couldn’t lose her, this wide-eyed being who knew everything and nothing at the same time. He couldn’t bear the thought of this Janet, his Janet, collapsing down into a lifeless marble. They’d been through so much, even if she couldn’t remember the details of most of it. He remembered for her, and that was enough. She was enough, whether she glitched or not.

For a hallmark of empathy, “Fear for the Safety of Others” made into onto surprisingly few Hallmark Cards. Once Sean arrived Michael knew that the humans were doomed to eternal torture, but in that split second when he'd first seen the demon seated behind his desk, his greatest fear had been for Janet, a creation supposedly incapable of feeling pain. What would happen to her, once the fake Good Place was destroyed? What use would the Bad Place make of her, or would they just marbleize her along with the neighborhood he’d forced her to build under false pretenses? The area where a heart might have been in a human of his size ached when he saw the magnetized cuffs on her wrists. She was powerless, and he was powerless to help her.

She couldn’t be bad. Of all the millions of tasks in the world, it was the one thing she couldn’t do. She could look like a Bad Janet, alright, down to the trashy fake nails and the omnipresent DiePhone, but when it came right down to it she was incapable of hiding her goodness. These days her obedience came less from programming and more from her genuine wish to help the group of them escape, but regardless of motivation, the need to please was too strongly embedded in her for her to deny a direct request. He could only hope she passed unnoticed. It would be easy for some perverse demon to take a paperclip and destroy her forever. Despite her abilities, she was vulnerable in so many ways. The need to protect her had become a fierce urge inside his chest, a fire not unlike heartburn, but less easily cured by over-the-counter remedies. He would not allow Sean or anyone else to take her away from him.

Gratitude was one of his favorite feelings, though like any self-respecting demon, he hated to be in anyone’s debt. With Janet it wasn’t so much IOU as it was “Thank you for rescuing me from everlasting misery and an endless stream of pointlessly pretentious magazines”. Yet he didn’t mind being in her debt. He was too glad to see her, too relieved that she’d survived the hell that was Hell. He’d hugged her then, despite the rush to escape. He’d needed to touch her, to prove to himself that she was real and whole and not some terrible joke or manic hallucination. The joy of that moment kept him afloat in the months to come.

Four ticker tape machines. A demon and a not-girl, alone in an unadorned room. They rarely spoke, just watched anxiously as the fate of their friends ticked slowly by. He could see the way she obsessed over Jason’s life, see how every poor choice and bad decision the boy made caused her body to tense. She was in love, as crazy as that was. Love was still an unknown for Michael, at least, love of that kind. He had no desire for the sort of pitiful romantic dalliances most humans got up to, and his days of lust had ended centuries ago with a fizzle, rather than a bang. He really ought to have paid more attention to the instructions on the fireworks box. In any case, seeing Janet so heartsick over her numbskull Floridian made him appreciate all the more fully how much he’d changed. He worried about her now. Not just in an “I might lose her” way. He wanted her to be happy, to smile the way she’d once smiled, her eyes bright and hopeful. He wanted it enough that he, too, began to live for the brief shining moments in the humdrum, idiotic life of Jason Mendoza. And when the four humans took a turn for the worse, it was for Janet’s sake that he risked his neck sneaking down to earth. Michael couldn’t bear the thought of watching her watch Jason slowly condemn himself to the Bad Place. Of all the tortures he’d come up with over the centuries, that had to be the worst. Well, second worst. Tweezer Ear Spiders. That had been an inspired moment in his torture career. But this was pretty darn bad.

Demons did not have families, which meant they avoided the scourge that was Christmas dinners and reunion weekends. Even creatures of darkness had their limits when it came to inflicting pain. No one enjoyed 4-hour-long arguments over whether it was alright to call a former U.S. President “The Black One” or if there was gluten in the obviously bread-based stuffing. No one. Until he’d spent 800 reboots in his Neighborhood, Michael had considered families the sort of delightful torture humans inflicted upon themselves. But that was hundreds of years ago or, in Jeremy Bearimy time, half an “e”. He’d grown since then. He had a family now, one that he loved, in his way. Sure, all four humans could be insufferable at times, and none of them were entirely good people, but he liked that about them. And even when his actions threatened to doom him and them forever, it still felt right to be with them once more. He needed them. And she needed them. Janet could never have been happy in the afterlife without Jason and the rest of the humans. They brought her joy, an odd gift for an artificial intelligence system, but better than novelty socks, he supposed. And since his own happiness relied more and more upon Janet’s state of mind, he felt no qualms about defying the Judge and escaping to rejoin the others. 

He did not force Janet to remain at his side on Earth, but she did so anyway. Habit, perhaps, or maybe just the lack of a Void to use as an escape. He saw the toll it took on her, the difficulty she had adjusting to a truly human body with all its idiosyncrasies. Feet were strange, there was no getting around it. Hooves were so much more useful. If he could have made the transition easier for her he would have, but alas, no such option existed. The worst part (for all of them, really) was the loss of her powers. It was just so convenient to have anything and everything appear from nowhere fully formed. But in some ways the loss brought her closer to the humans, made her more of a being and less of a concept in a conveniently familiar shape. She still knew more than anyone in existence, but when she wanted a take-out box of jalapeno poppers or a mid-size giraffe, she just had to get it the old-fashioned way. This made her competence all the more impressive. 

In some dusty tome deep within the Afterlife Archive, he’d once read about the design of Janets. The creators, left anonymous for their own protection, had chosen to make Janet in the shape of a human female so that she would appear unthreatening and pleasant. The book had described Janet’s exterior as that of a mildly attractive Caucasian woman in her early thirties, of average height and build, intentionally formed without any objectionable or distracting features. Michael found that description lacking in a dozen different ways. After seeing how she conducted herself in a fight, he was of half a mind to submit a correction to the book. Janet was not a bland and friendly humanoid, she was a goddess capable of defeating a dozen demons single-handed. In heels, no less. She was beautiful, and kind, and infinitely more forgiving than anyone else in the afterlife. She was unquestionably the best of all of them, and he felt an absurd rush of pride whenever he thought about how far she’d come. To think he’d chosen her at random, picked her because she was closest to the warehouse door at the time. What would life have been like with another Janet? How could a mere information delivery system compare with the not-woman, not-robot that accompanied him everywhere? He could imagine so many things, yet he could not visualize his life without Janet. 

He took her hand without thinking, the moment she offered passage into her void. Never mind that he knew they might not survive, never mind that she would be transporting four humans and a demon to a place no one but her was ever meant to go. He trusted her, and that was enough. She was his Janet, after all. His truest friend, his greatest ally. His girl.


End file.
